CogBlogged Tagged ‘audiocasts’

Last week was our most recent meeting of our Ocotillo Online Learning Group (OLG) meeting– OLG is an open meeting once a month at different college sites at Maricopa. The October meeting was at South Mountain Community College, featuring a topic of Copyright, Not Copywrong. As our trend this year, we captured two of the segments simply by plunking down an iRiver MP3 recorded in front of the room and they are connected into our OLG Podcasts. At this meeting, we had librarian Hazel Davis of Rio Salaod provide an overview of Copyright in the Online Environment– the link there will take you to the presentation, handouts, and the 51 minute audio recording: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/olg/audio/olg_oct05_davis.mp3 I did a 5 minute song and dance about Creative commons (mostly links in the notes). We then had a counsel form our legal department do some Q&A with the audience, also recorded: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/olg/audio/olg_oct05_mcconnell.mp3 It was [...]

Rising like a bullet up the record charts of Instructional Technology Issues this year is Learning Space Design, with a lot of good stuff coming out of the EDUCAUSE ELI initiative and the July/September 2005 issue of EDUCAUSE Review. It’s timely here at Maricopa, having last year passed a very large bond election for major construction at our 10 colleges, which was a factor in our having hosted our own Ocotillo Learning Spaces Day here recently, September 16. It is the challenge of creating physical structures that may last 30 years, when the activities, tools, that are used within have a much shorter frequency of change. Will we build buildings like we did in the 1990s? On September 16, we had about 120 folks from teams sent by our 10 colleges have a full day’s worth of focus on the topic. It was very well received, appreciated. Sp part of [...]

Interesting site in a quick flyby: Loomia is a search and tag site for audio and video “casts”: As more and more audio and video makes their way to the Internet, it has become increasingly difficult to find things that you like. Loomia is a podcast and videocast search engine plus much more. Our goal is to help you discover, share, and manage things of interest to you. We make use of the likes and dislikes of an ever-increasing community to filter through thousands of channels to help you find good stuff. It’s got tags, free personal accounts, most popular listings… good stuff. Since my blue pill is still active, I will leave it to the reader to think about what happens when anyone can tag something as “Education” A tip of the blog hat to Alec Couros, just swiped from his blog feed.

My 1995 Nissan pickup has 125,000 miles under its wheels and I’d like to see more flip by. For sometime we’ve been hearing this occasional squeak/squeal coming from either the belts or the wheels, it is intermittent and hard to associate with specific events. We’ve asked our mechanic to check it out, trying to describe it accurately as “like a teak kettle across the room just getting ready to whistle” but they can never seem to reproduce the sound. Of course, I am hearing it almost every day driving home, so last night I had a (what I thought) was brilliant flash- I was carrying my iRiver MP3 player/recorder, so I just turned it on and held it outside the window as I drove around my neighborhood. There’s a lot of wind noise, but I am hoping enough of the squeak is there to play for our mechanic… her it [...]

The kiwis have a great expression about being able to fix anything with some number 8 bailing wire, sort of the down under flavor of duct tape. I just spent about 90 minutes cobbling together what I hope to be a framework for supporting audio content across a number of our content sites. I’ve yet to join the merry gang of Podcasting Is The Greatest Thing Since ________, but I do so a value of adding more audio content to our site, capturing events, meetings, interviews etc. This will be a hasty and haphazard explanation of what I did, cause I really want to get home and have some dinner ;-) First of all, I will be capturing the audio on the cheap, plopping down a new iRiver iFP 799 MP3 recorded (1 Gb model with external line and input ports). It’s a love hate relationship -I love being able [...]

On the first leg of my flight from Phoenix to Aspen, I’ve listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s ITConversations podcast on Human Nature. Author of the popular Blink and Tipping Point books, Malcolm Gladwell seems in voice to to find a great way to bring about data, research, and human nature to an interesting place. In this session he is talking about mistakes organizations made by doing extensive field tests of new products (Herman Miller’s Aeron chairs, New Coke, making strategic decisions based on these tests, only to find in execution, they are dead wrong for how people really feel. The Aeron chair, Herman Miller’s most successful and profitable chair, was meticulously designed to address a wide array of office chair problems (you would be amazed at how complex a simple chair and its use is). In their test with people who should be attracted (modern designers)– it was disliked consistently. The [...]

Breaking News! Based on all the feedback on my complaints about the slippery ear buds that came with my iPod Shuffle, I googled for the suggested Sony brand, and quickly found the Sony MDR-EX81LP buds at Amazon for $32 clams. And in white cables to match the pod. But what an even nicer surprise when the box came to my house in less than 24 hours than I ordered them! How the heck to they do that? I just plugged them in and the sound is much better than the Apple mini waffles. I’ll know better tomorrow when/if I go for a run. Just hope the cables hold up to the heat and my sweat here– there is a fair bit of packaging meant to wrap of the cords. Wow, does technology get more fascinating than this?

Podcasting has been an interesting phenomena to observe. It really did not exist a year ago, and has been riding like a bullet up the technology charts, most recently fueled by inclusion of its features in Apple’s iTunes. It’s all good. I’ve been trying to sample more from a variety of sources, mostly on my idle time of bicycle commuting or running. I’m hard pressed to say if I would really devote the time to them other wise. The best for my interests has been far the offerings of ITConversations, mainly due to the quality of the productions, but more so, the quality of the personalities I can choose to listen to. What I do not buy is the “subscription” model because I cannot say I have found a source I would want to listen to most of the content most of the time. I do not do that with [...]

I’m getting prepped to do some upcoming audio interviews wia Skype or iChat A/V — I have a new iRiver mp3 recorder with a line in, and was fussing with hooking that up with a microphone to record me talking and external speakers for the interviewee… If I thought my previous iRiver had a confusing interface, the IFP-799 takes the confusion cake… the manual is 50+ pages, and there is a 10 layer deep sequence of obscure control settings. I am sure it will just take time, from a user design, it… well sucks. Someone please send the iRiver folks a palette of Donald Norman books please. This contortion was because my previous attempts using WireTapPro were limited because you could only choose to record audio line in OR audio out, not both; doing so required a third LineIn mixing software that gave me grief. Since the software would not [...]

Here is a quick summary of audio streams I have loaded/unloaded listened/skipped on my iPod. I hesitate to call them “podcasts” since I am manually downloading MP3 files and manually moving them on and off my Shuffle. All are found from ITConversations. For what its worth, I typically use the auto fill mode to populate my Shuffle and then play in shuffle mode (is that a double shuffle?). When I have some speeches to load, I clear enough songs off and manually move them to the Shuffle playlist, inserting them in the top tracks, and then switching the shuffle to run in playlist order. What I have not mastered is getting the Shuffle to jump to the top of the playlist (it is supposed to be 3 button clicks, but I have not gotten that to work). Anyhow, here are some casts that have been on my pod, listening recently [...]